You make good points, about that 90% figure and that I shouldn't imply salaried life as exploitation. There's a reasonably healthy free market and the means of production (a laptop) can be fished out of a trash can
I came at 90% since Google had 135k employees in 2020, and $209B in revenue. That's $1.5M per person, and then my mental math went off the rails.. obviously revenue isn't profit, and who knows if $150k/year/employee on average would be enough to provide the same benefits/take home pay on average. There are economies of scale at work too
PragmaticPulp has a fundamental belief deep in his soul that some people are good engineers, and others are "people who really just hate doing anything that resembles work". That, in my opinion, is wrong and leads to bad things*. I believe that anyone can succeed in the right environment.
* like Amazon/Microsoft giving hundreds of good employees the "unregretted attrition" axe because it's easier for upper management to do it that way
Yes, I would advise against taking Google as an explanation. As far as I can tell, Google does have some 'secret sauce' that takes in good people and turns that into revenue. And in some sense, the market pays for that secret sauce in the sense that (going by your numbers) they only need to pay out 10% of their revenue as salary. (Though part of that is also just that they have other costs, like actually running data centres.)
I suspect the average employee at Google would find it quite a lot more uncomfortable to get the same total compensation from a company they just founded.
I've worked at Google before, and I've also been on a PIP before.
You should re-read the comment you replied to carefully. PragmaticPulp doesn't imply that everyone on a PiP is bad a person and should feel bad.
For PragmaticPulp's argument it is more than enough that people on the job market skew towards being worse employees. Similarly, people on a PiP skew towards being lower achievers.
> IMO, you and every salaried engineer are someone who's willing to settle for donating 90% of the profits from their labor to shareholders in exchange for a little bit of comfort and an illusion of safety.
Where do you get the 90% figure from?
In general, it's really, really easy to start a company that makes use of programmer labour. Barriers to entry in the buy-side of the market for programmers are low. Especially with the more globalised labour market we got out of the pandemic.
So colour me suspicious of the notion that it's trivial to 'exploit' programmers and steal their lunch like you suggest.
Keep in mind that that most software projects in most companies are delayed or fail outright.